Heretical Analog Cable
Low Resistance? Nope...

Mad Scientist Heretical Analog Cable (HAC) also uses carbon fiber for the main conductor. But why "Heretical"?

Well the name comes from the fact that it's basically the same cable as the Heretical Digital Cable, except you get two cables, one red, one black, for stereo.

Heretical Analog is Different.

Using carbon fibers as the signal conductor has some beneficial effects:

Resistance : an HAC cable has around 37 ohms of resistance. In the digital version, this resistance helps remove the reflections that occur. A reflection that bounces off the DAC's input socket will travel the length of the cable and back again, thus experiencing around 75 ohms of resistance.  But in an analog cable, such reflections are not important. Or are they? The normal answer is no - the frequencies involved are not high enough. But I'm not so sure anymore. It's possible that you have RF interference and noise at the kind of frequencies that do matter, and it seems likely that they could reflect up and down the wire. Something must account for why these cables sound so much better. 

But surely you want to have ultra low resistance for an interconnect? If you read and believe the marketing that goes with many silver cables, you'd think that low resistance was an essential part of a good interconnect. Sorry but it's not. Just about every device used to send audio down an interconnect has an output impedance of several hundred ohms. This means that it's effectively an ideal source with a resistor in line. Often that is how it is implemented.  I'm not saying that silver wire can't sound good - it can - but I doubt that low resistance is the key to this. (In fact, due to it's lower resistance, silver wire has a thinner skin depth than copper wire).

Skin Effect is clearly important for digital cables, as the harmonics of the square waves go up to the 100MHz range and higher. There has been a lot of argument about whether this is important at audio frequencies. Using simple (or maybe simplistic) math shows that skin effect should have negligible impact at audio frequencies. On the other hand, listening critically to various wire thicknesses you get strong correlation between treble performance and wire gauge. The best treble seems to come from wire that is 20awg or thinner. (Note : HAC uses 29awg wire for ground return). But note I said wire. All metals used for wire, e.g. copper, silver, etc., have similar skin depths. But carbon fibers are different - because of their permittivity and resistance, the skin depth is much more, so any fiber or bundle of fibers in HAC is much smaller than the skin depth.

But frankly, the reason we use Carbon Fibers for the conductor is because it sounds great, better then any wire I've tried.

RCA Plugs

The results of our  testing mean that we now offer KLE Innovations plugs on the Heretical Analog Cable. The gains are quite audible, with an apparent speeding up of the sound, that touch more resolution. Our standard plugs are KLEI Copper Harmony and Absolute Harmony. Others available on request.

Prices and Options

Heretical Analog Cable is white, and available in 1 meter and 1.5 meter lengths. Available also in balanced configuration with Neutrik XLR plugs